If you are approved for academic accommodations by your Weingarten Center disability specialist, you will need to submit a semester request through the MyWeingartenCenter portal. This process gives students the chance to review their accommodations and decide which accommodations to activate for each of their current classes. Completing the Semester Request also sends a notification to their course instructors, allowing them to review the students’ accommodation letters. These letters list the accommodations but do not provide any disability-related information.
After you take this step, you are strongly encouraged to meet with your professors during office hours to discuss how the accommodations will be implemented. You are not expected to discuss your disability or anything disability-related, as those discussions remain confidential between you and your disability specialist.
When you meet with your instructor, discuss what your accommodation entails. You should carefully read the course syllabi and consider what elements of the course might be a challenge. Be open to the faculty having creative ways of handling some accommodations, especially those that may not be common in their courses. However, you should always be honest about what will and will not be helpful.
Your assigned disability specialist is available to guide you through the process if you need help preparing for a conversation with a faculty member, if you already had a conversation with the instructor and are feeling uncertain about it, or if you simply do not feel comfortable getting the conversation started.
At the start of every semester, the Weingarten Center will email a reminder that students previously approved for academic accommodations must submit a new semester request in order to apply their accommodations to their current courses and send accommodation letters to those instructors. Please note that if you add a course after submitting a semester request (during the course selection period), you will need to submit another semester request for that additional course. Otherwise, faculty for that course will not be notified of your approved accommodations.
Overall, the best approach is for students to actively communicate with their professors and their disability specialists.